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Jaguar Heritage Museum

Jaguar Heritage Museum, Coventry

Jaguar's museum was established in 1983, and is now housed in a building next to the Browns Lane factory in Coventry. The museum is dedicated to Jaguar, Daimler, and Lanchester motor companies. Daimler absorbed the Lanchester motor company in 1931, and Daimler itself was eventually bought by Jaguar in 1960. It is this shared history which has resulted in a museum dedicated to three marques.

The collection houses over a hundred cars, although there is not enough room to display all the vehicles in the collection. Cars not on display are housed in a separate building, and might be available to view. Ask the curator.

Above the museum is an archive room dedicated to the history of the three companies represented. This history has relevance outside the world of cars, since mass production methods championed by Frederick Lanchester, against the judgment of his company directors, came to dominate modern industry. Frederick Lanchester always worried his commercially minded company directors by his insistence on quality. The Lanchester directors were of the opinion that it was better to use cheap labour to hand fit parts. Lanchester disagreed. He wanted to guarantee the quality of his product, and the only way to do this was to take unpredictable individual hands out of the manufacturing process. Lanchester insisted on the use of standardised parts made with precision machine tools. The word "manufacture" means to make by hand, but Lanchester wanted to change this. Today we associate the idea of "hand made" with quality. Lanchester would not have had any patience with that idea.